Pencil drawing of a snail with shaded shell and textured body beside cursive script reading I'll be there soon, shown as a design sketch rather than on skin.

Pencil snail with I'll be there soon script

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a snail in side view, with a shaded spiral shell, textured body and raised eye stalks. Cursive script above the snail reads I'll be there soon. The shading is soft and grey, with fine hatching on the shell and stippled texture on the body, on a plain off-white background.

Script Lettering Shell Pencil drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My brother Tam has never once arrived when he said he would. On Skerrow that is not a complaint so much as a weather report. The ferry from Oban comes when the wind allows, the post comes on Tuesdays if the sea is kind, and Tam comes home when the last creel is hauled and the lads have finished arguing about the football.

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The message came scribbled on the back of a bait receipt and pinned to the kitchen door with a limpet shell: I'll be there soon. I had been waiting since the Thursday. Mam had left the lamp lit in the window, and I was sitting at the table with the snail Tam brought home in March, the big brown one he prised off the hull of the Morag and named after the harbour master.

I set Fergus on the oilcloth and poured a saucer of rainwater beside him. He moved the way snails do, as if the table were a sea he had decided to cross on principle. I timed him on the clock above the range. Eleven minutes to reach the edge of the cloth. Tam always swore a snail could beat him to the pier if it started first, and he still had the bruises from the afternoon he tried to prove it.

The engine note came up the bay just as Fergus reached the tiled floor, leaving a bright thread behind him on the wood. I went to the door with the lamp. Tam was on the slipway, soaked to the knees and grinning like a fool. Told you, he called. Soon enough, I said, and I lifted the snail off the step so nobody would tread on him, and we stood in the rain while the tide turned.